There have only been a few presidents that have expanded on the size of America. None have done it like Jefferson and Polk. Though they had different views on the world they had many of the same policies of expansion. Both technically bought the land. At the times both of their practice's were considered shady. Jefferson and Polk both also were afraid of foreign powers swooping down and taking the land.

When you are a president it is always good to appear fair and diplomatic. This is why the presidents wanted to buy the land. Thomas Jefferson bought his land from France in the famous Louisiana purchase. It was a bargain brought on the table by France for many differing reasons. Polk on the other hand fought Mexico in a war. Then once he owned the land gave them only a portion of what it was worth. He had leverage over the Mexicans because he had crushed their armies in the Mexican war.

Its hard to escape the presidency without some scandal. Polk and Jefferson both could not accomplish this. Jefferson bought the Louisiana purchase from France. Even though he believes and, at the time it was widely believe he shouldn’t have that power. Polk’s on the other hand was more substantial. He sent troops into either America, Mexico or, the disputed territory and they were ambushed prompting the war. If the troops were in the disputed territory then they might declare war. If they were in Mexico what Polk did was illegal. IF the troops were in Texas then it is all out war. Polk never clarified where the troop were to we may never know.

During Jefferson’s and Polk’s presidencies America wasn’t really a world power. So when America got the chance to take land they took it quickly. Jefferson when offered the Louisiana purchase acted quickly so the French might not change their minds or some other country would take the weakly guarded land. Polk also was afraid that the Russians or the British might swoop down and take California. Something Polk couldn’t afford.

YOU MAY ALSO FIND THESE DOCUMENTS HELPFUL

...Expansion
There were two presidents that did a great deal for our country in the area of expansion. These two
presidents are Thomas Jefferson and James K. Polk. Though they had completely different policies on
expansion and foreign affairs, both of them vastly expanded the country.
Jefferson was a believer in the Monroe Doctrine which basically said we will mind our own busi
ness. He was also a very firm believer in a strict interpretation of the constitution. He did not look to vastly
expand our country and when the opportunity presented itself he had a hard time making the right decision.
The United States was surrounded by European owned areas: England had Canada, Spain had Florida,
and France had Louisiana. Fearing a possible war Jefferson strengthened the army especially by Louisiana.
This act scared Napoleon, he was in a war with England and didn't even need the Louisiana Territory, so
fearing a war with the U.S. and needing money for his war with England he offered to sell the whole Louisi
ana Territory to us for very cheap. Jefferson not sure if the constitution justified the act of making this
purchase struggled with the decision. He decided he didn't have much of a choice and accepted Napoleons
offer. On the other hand, James K. Polk was a firm believer in Manifest Destiny, which was the belief that
the United States was...

...“President Polk as a Southern Sectionalist” in A Companion to the Antebellum Presidents, 1837-1861. Edited by Joel Silbey (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, Forthcoming 2012)
James Knox Polk was a slave-owning Tennessee Democrat who devoted his private life to profit from plantation slavery and his public career to his party and his section. He was, in short, a fierce Southern partisan. Yet this reality has been masked by generations of shallow scholarship or outright Southern apologetics. Biographies of the eleventh president have gloried in his aggressive territorial expansionism with little thought to motive or context; they have celebrated his strong leadership as chief executive without understanding his principles, goals, or personal ideology; they have taken his words as a Democratic partisan and successful planter-politician at face-value, failing to sufficiently explore party agenda and mechanics. Moreover, studies of the Mexican War or the broader antebellum era do not adequately uncover the partisan Polk, though several do a fine job of placing him the context of party and section.
In dispute are not the events of Polk’s career and administration, but his motives and principles. Born in North Carolina in November 1795, Polk made his life in the wilds of Tennessee as a capable lawyer and ambitious politician. Under the guidance of the influential planter-politician Andrew Jackson, Polk...

...Hofstader Essay
“Jeffersonian political philosophy, the Aristocrat as Democrat was consistently inconsistent.” Evaluate and comment on this statement based on Hofstader Reading Chapter 2.
Thomas Jefferson was a very peculiar man. He was a wealthy aristocrat from the colony of Virginia and was a Democrat in the government. His ideas were very inconsistent with the life he lived. Many of his ideas contradicted his own life which made him a consistently inconsistent man. Thomas Jefferson’s political philosophy contradicted Jefferson’s own life and allow for the less fortunate colonists to prosper.
Thomas Jefferson lived a very prosperous and comfortable life in which his political philosophy was the opposite. He was the son of Peter Jefferson and Jane Randolph. His father was a self-made man but his mother came from a distinguished Virginia family which assured the social position of Thomas. In 1575, Thomas’s father died leaving him with over 2,700 acres and a large number of slaves. This privilege Thomas had allowed him to write about human liberty which was supported by the three generations of slaves he encountered. With Thomas writing about human liberty, he was contradicting his own beliefs because he had over 200 slaves himself. Also, under the leadership of Jefferson, Virginia reformers abolished primogeniture. The policy of primogeniture however was the basis of Jefferson’s social and...

...JeffersonEssay
Thomas Jefferson played a very important role in the history of the United States. Jefferson is most famously known for writing the Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson talked many times about African-Americans in America. Where they equal to white people? How were whites and blacks different? What about slavery? Thomas Jefferson had an opinion on all of these subjects, but much of what Thomas Jefferson said was later contradicted with his own words.
What did Thomas Jefferson mean when he said that all men were equal? Well, many people would agree with what it means today in modern times. Today the statement, all men are created equal means; all men and women whether black, white, tall, short, fat, or skinny were all created equal. That is not necessarily what it meant in the 1700s. Blacks were enslaved and worked hard while wealthy white men did nothing of the sort. Justice Thurgood Marshall said, “The blacks were so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect… and that the Negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit.” This excerpt shows that in that time blacks were not treated the same as whites and clearly did not have the same rights. Conor Cruise O’Brien’s book confirms this belief as he takes a quote from Thomas Jefferson himself: “It is accepted that...

...
In 1803, President Thomas Jefferson purchased the territory of Louisiana from the French government for $15 million. The Louisiana Purchase stretched from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains and from Canada to New Orleans, and it doubled the size of the United States. To Jefferson, westward expansion was the key to the nation’s health: He believed that a republic depended on an independent, virtuous citizenry for its survival, and that independence and virtue went hand in hand with land ownership, especially the ownership of small farms. (“Those who labor in the earth,” he wrote, “are the chosen people of God.”) In order to provide enough land to sustain this ideal population of virtuous yeomen, the United States would have to continue to expand.The westward expansion of the United States is one of the defining themes of 19th-century American history, but it is not just the story of Jefferson’s expanding “empire of liberty.” On the contrary, as one historian writes, in the six decades after the Louisiana Purchase, westward expansion “very nearly destroy[ed] the republic.”
By 1840, nearly 7 million Americans–40 percent of the nation’s population–lived in the trans-Appalachian West. Most of these people had left their homes in the East in search of economic opportunity. Like Thomas Jefferson, many of these...

...In 1803, President Thomas Jefferson purchased the territory of Louisiana from the French government for $15 million. The Louisiana Purchase stretched from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains and from Canada to New Orleans, and it doubled the size of the United States. To Jefferson, westward expansion was the key to the nation’s health: He believed that a republic depended on an independent, virtuous citizenry for its survival, and that independence and virtue went hand in hand with land ownership, especially the ownership of small farms. (“Those who labor in the earth,” he wrote, “are the chosen people of God.”) In order to provide enough land to sustain this ideal population of virtuous yeomen, the United States would have to continue to expand.
The westward expansion of the United States is one of the defining themes of 19th-century American history, but it is not just the story of Jefferson’s expanding “empire of liberty.” On the contrary, as one historian writes, in the six decades after the Louisiana Purchase, westward expansion “very nearly destroy[ed] the republic.”
More to Explore
PEOPLE AND GROUPS
* Thomas Jefferson
* Meriwether Lewis
* Donner Party
* Daniel Boone
* Davy Crockett
* Andrew Jackson
THEMES
* United States Immigration Before 1965
* Colonial American Culture
EVENTS
* Louisiana Purchase
* Trail of Tears
* War of...

...The westward expansion, which started in the 1820s, was one of the biggest steps
forward our country has ever taken. It nearly tripled the size of our country and increased the
population by monstrous amounts. It also improved the economy greatly though agricultural
means, prompted political leaders to sent people to explore (Lewis and Clark), started a civil
war, motivated huge amounts of people to move west, and almost destroyed our country.
Theexpansion was magnified greatly by the Louisiana Purchase, when President
Jefferson bought a large area of land west of the Mississippi river from Spain, the purchase
added large amounts of futile, unsettled land to the United States. This purchase was made
possible by the exuberant democratic belief in the Manifest Destiny.
The Manifest Destiny was a belief that Americans were meant to explore the western
territories and settle the entire continent this, was strongly believed by most democrats and
was a large political controversy. This, as well as making the Louisiana Purchase possible, made
it so that President Polk could start the Mexican War.
The Mexican War was a war between America and Mexico during which the U.S.
acquired large amounts of land formerly owned by Mexico. The war started in 1846 and ended
in 1848. The war was prompted by the Mexicans invading the U.S. annex of Texas which even
after the Texas Revolution in 1836...

...﻿
In 1803 President Thomas Jefferson purchased Louisiana from the French. The territory stretched from the missisipi river to the rocky mountains, from Canada to New Orleans, completely doubling the size of the U.S.
Jefferson believed if the whole country was a good down to earth working class community that it would be the future and uprising of the newly settle country. The Westward expansion is one of the defining themes of the 19th century American history both in positive and destructive ways.
By the 1840s, 40% of the population of the US lived in the expandetery western territories. They left the east to move to the West to become wealthy and successful in the west. They saw the west as a chance to claim land, make money and to create a ‘moving forward’ society. John O’sullivan coined the term ‘Manifest Destiny’. Basically saying that the big shift to the West is what the country needed and that the countries freedom depended on it. The debate discussing whether or not the west would be free or not led to the compromise of Missouri. Missouri was allowed to enter the union as a slave holding state and the new state of Maine was accepted as a free state to maintain a balance of slave and non-slave holding states in congress. Slavery would be outlawed anywhere north of the southern boundary of Missouri throughout the rest of the Louisiana purchase.
However, The Missouri compromise did not apply to new territories, it...